5 ms·
Besides reduced birth rate what else does cultural decline mean? It also seems like your hypothesis is "more lax social norms lead to lower birth rate" but thi
by JamesBarney 3y ago
Besides reduced birth rate what else does cultural decline mean?
It also seems like your hypothesis is "more lax social norms lead to lower birth rate" but this clearly isn't the case because east Asia has much lower birth rates than the US despite much stricter social norms.
I think the hypothesis "industrialization, urbanization, and density lead to lower birth rates" describes the world better and makes more sense.
- rayiner 3y agoTo be clear, Scandinavia doesn’t have “more relaxed social norms.” It’s actually an extremely norm-driven society. It’s just that this one particular norm common to abrahamic religions has declined sharply. I think that’s the same reason birth rates have dropped so sharply in east Asia. Their religious tradition doesn’t place the same value on having children as a moral imperative. In fact the opposite is true: an entire generation of Asians was socialized by the west into a mindset that population reduction is the way to prosperity. (My dad is an expert in this field that did that work.) Industrialization explains it in part—you don’t need as many kids when less of the population is engaged in farming. But many western countries had a TFR over 3 in the mid 20th century, a time when we had supersonic airplanes already. The US had a replacement TFR as recently as 2008, prior to a sharp drop in religiosity over the last decade. The point is that norms can, among their many other powers, can maintain sustainable population replacement even within an industrialized society.